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Updated: May 6, 2025
I shook off the uncanny feeling that the place was beginning to cast over me, and turned fiercely on the faithful Aboo Din. He slunk away with a low salaam, muttering something about the Heaven-Born being all wise, and later I saw him in deep converse with his first-born under a palm-thatched cadjang on the bow. I was half inclined to take Aboo Din's advice and drop down the stream.
That it was under a high state of cultivation was evident. Mercer saw tier upon tier of rice terraces on the hillsides. But what astonished him most was the city itself. It covered almost the entire surface of the lake a huge collection of little palm-thatched shacks built upon platforms raised above the water on stilts.
Before they reached the bungalow the short-lived Indian twilight was dying, and the tiny oil-lamps began to twinkle in the palm-thatched huts of the toilers' village on the estate. And forth from it swarmed the coolies, men, women, children, not to welcome them, but to stare at the sacred elephant. Many heads bent low, many hands were lifted to foreheads in awed salutation.
After the day's work was done, I used to go down to the shores of the bay, and lie at full length on the cool sand for two or three hours before bedtime. The soft pale light, resting on broad sandy beaches and palm-thatched huts, reproduced the effect of a mid-winter scene in the cold north when a coating of snow lies on the landscape.
Wherever a native village exists, there are seen growing in clusters, beautiful ornaments beside the palm-thatched huts, the tall and elegant pupunha, or peach palm Guilielma speciosa to the height of sixty feet, and often perfectly straight. A single bunch of the fruit weighs as much as a man can carry, and on each tree several are borne.
A large party had collected under the wide palm-thatched roof of the dyeing shed-pretty and ugly, brown and fair, tall and short; some upright and some bent by toil at the loom from early youth, but all young; not one more than eighteen years old. Slaves were capital, bearing interest in the form of work and of children. Every slave girl was married to a slave as soon as she was old enough.
There were no furnishings save two large and brilliantly polished cocoanut-tree trunks running the whole length of the interior, and between them piles of mats of many designs and of every bright hue that roots and herbs will yield. While I admired these, noting their rich colors and soft, yet firm, texture, a murmurous rustle on the palm-thatched roof announced the coming of the rain.
On the roads and in the gardens lay uprooted trees and many slightly-built houses which had been blown down, while the tents in the strangers' quarter, and hundreds of light palm-thatched roofs, had been swept away. The Regent was returning to Thebes, and with him went Ameni, who desired to ascertain by his own eyes what mischief the whirlwind had done to his garden in the city.
With the exception of the rich grass which covered the surface of the ground, the only vegetation visible consisted of a few clumps of palm-trees, with fan-like leaves, scattered here and there over the wide expanse. The farm-buildings consisted of palm-thatched huts surrounded by a fence of palm-trunks, beyond which were the corrals or cattle enclosures.
The box was in a corner of the wretched palm-thatched hovel I inhabited; but on taking it out I discovered that for several weeks the rain had been dripping on it, and that the manuscript was reduced to a sodden pulp. I flung it upon the floor with a curse and threw myself back on my bed with a groan.
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